Saturday, May 1, 2010

Online Adaptive Game Design

For my 3rd year survey report, i have selected the topic "Adaptive Game Design". So I am doing some researches on it. I would like to share what I got familiar with this field so far as an Introduction (Below is an abstraction of my interim report)

When compare a commercial game with a specific commercial software product both in similar capacity, still publishers or rather companies tend to fear for directly involving for just games. That is why yet only a few leading well-known gaming companies are in the market. It is true that most of the games have indeed a real competitive game play. What developers try to do is make a player centered game which can satisfy its players at best while granting a competitiveness plus joy. AI for games has reached to its top today. Game world has been able to behave like in the real world with help of the advance physic and mathematical functions. Throughout the processes like modeling agents, coding, alpha, beta and game play testing, and making development kits for bugs and modifications, developers often concern for a particular limited group of potential users.

Throughout the history there are so many research papers have been written and have been practically applied for small scale games. Adaptation is a major topic not only in games but biological experiments, outer space explorations, nano evolutionary theory and many other engineering aspects. But what it differs from each field is that what technology optimally suits and in what extent it is going to be applied.

In this paper it is going to be demonstrated that still highly aggressive and competitive game play can be achieved with exceptive efficiency, effectively and robustness with help of dynamically adaptive gaming concepts and technologies. This adaptively can be either learning without human interaction (offline) or learning with human interaction during game play (online) [1]. This paper concerns most about online adaptive game development and its feasibility with current gaming life cycle.Adaptation can be defined as “ability to make appropriate responses to changed or changing circumstances” [2] plus learn from its past mistakes and acting like smart.

When it comes to the player’s role, there can be players those who are really smart thinking and play the game with their own logics. But some takes much time for completing a level and some are aggressive. Each of them has different views to the game and of course implementing a game which is capable of satisfying majority of these groups can be really hard to achieve. But throughout the playing life cycle of the game, modeling each player to a default weight and while in the game play, adjusting this weight to fit with player’s performance regarding the knowledge gathers from online statistics and player head up displays (HUDs) updates, adaptive decision making system can established inside the game.